After the Storm
by Rose Colt
Summary: He imagines her as the sky, all gold and indigo, sunny and clear. Please read/review! First story I've posted on here in years.


_AN: I've never watched a full episode of this show, but hot-damn the fanfic for this is addictive. Hope I did it justice. This song just screamed Olicity. _

_Disclaimer: I don't own any of it. _

**Because death is just so full, and man so small.**

**Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before. **

He'd say he wasn't one for theatrics, but that would be a lie. He dresses up in green leather and uses a modulator on his voice. He was a grown man covered in war paint. His identity is no identity. He's the billionaire, the vigilante, the brother, the son, the playboy, the lover, the resurrected, the martyr. He's everyone and no one and that's never been so terrifying as it is right in this moment.

This moment. This moment in time. This excruciating pain, this agonizing suffering that has been culminating for years. Slade has been brewing hatred for years. His is the perfect revenge. He destroys it all. Every single thing Oliver cared for, every person he loved.

Roy loses patience. Thea loses faith. His mother loses heart.

Sara's loss takes a little longer, but the sting of it is dulled by havoc being wrought around him. She loses hope, which is probably why her loss takes a little more time to become fully realized. She was never one to have much hope to begin with. Her identity is another borrowed one, stitched together from memories and beatings and mistakes and lost love.

Diggle loses strength. Slade makes it clear that there is no force on earth he cannot conquer, and John Diggle is selfish for the first time in his adult life. He takes Lyla, and what only they know will be a little girl someday, and he runs. He has no strength left to fight, and when he wakes up next to his family years later, he prays for forgiveness but he asks for peace because he knows the strength he lost will never be returned.

Oliver loses Felicity. Slade takes her on a Monday morning. There is nothing left but a panda flat, size eight, and a dark stone in his chest.

Oliver loses his mind. He goes AWOL for a week. He doesn't expect to recover any of his losses. He revisits every single memory of unspoken words, longing glances, exaggerated sighs, and brief touches between souls.

He regrets nothing and everything and hates himself and hates the world and his screams weaken to tears. He imagines her as the sky, all gold and indigo, sunny and clear. He imagines a life where he woke up to gorgeous skies every morning, and fell asleep in the light rather than surviving in the dark.

Oliver finds Felicity on a Sunday morning when the world is quiet and his mind is at its breaking point. He thinks he may be hallucinating. He remembers the threat from Slade those months before.

_You will lose everything._

He finds her and she smiles. In that moment, he imagines heaven couldn't hold a candle to Felicity in a lace dress with flowers in her hair.

Maybe Felicity wins. And as Slade takes his final breath, it's one full of bitterness and sorrow and so many regrets that they all blur together into one conscious thought: _Forgive me, Shado, for I have sinned. Loving you has destroyed me._

Oliver loses his mind but maybe Felicity wins. Maybe she was always the dark horse, maybe she was always meant to lead her very own victory charge.

Maybe they've lost it all. But, Felicity wins and Oliver accepts what she has tried so hard to keep silent, what all of the unspoken words and touches between souls really amount to; what the space surrounding the silence is filled with: _It's loving you that's saved me. _

Oliver finds gold and indigo smiling back at him when he wakes up, and his hand reaches across miles of space and years of time, and touches the sky.

_**And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.**_

_**And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.**_

_**Get over your hill and see what you find there,**_

_**with grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.**_


End file.
